Stuff the packing and return preparations. Two more days. We bus out South to Ninh Binh Province, a poor and relatively untouristed area. Around us towering stumps of mountains rise out of the rice paddies. The first day we hire pushbikes.The second day, motorbikes. This is a sharp, bleak, strange landscape.
Crab like, the boat people use their feet to row with. Who is leading us in this age-greyed boat past mountains and through caves? Unseen people have been waiting at the water’s edge and our oarswoman changes, silently. When we turn it is a man; later an older woman with a narrow face and grey hair wisping under her conical hat. People become interchangeable; only the brown feet, almost clasping the oars, seem to remain the same. In the war, unseen, Uncle Ho’s body was laid lovingly and gently in a cave in the mountains such as these, as millions died.
Weary, we head homewards in the dusk. The road is open, empty. To our left mountains punch the air. I think a child has made them for the school mural, but did not know how to tear gently with the grain of the grey sugar paper to shape them. Their outline is jaggedy, rough. On the deserted highway to our left two men in black hats push an empty ornate red and gold chariot. Behind them is a funeral procession. Men wearing white hooded netting dresses play wooden one -stringed instruments, droning double reeded horns and drums. The women behind them laugh and talk. Sunken down from the road beyond the rice paddies are silhouetted people stoking up the funeral pyre. Upon it they place huge shields of woven crimson and yellow flower heads.
We cycle on past bricks, rubble, rocks hewn from the mountains. The air is thick with dust. To our right a man with a pitchfork stands on the 40 foot diameter rim of a circular stone construction; a giant 15 foot high birthday cake iced with white hot coals where rocks from the mountain are baked with sand and coal to build the roads. This is hard, harsh labour. Rough café signs advertise ‘chien de nui’. Golden-eyed dogs with spiky singed looking dark fur slouch around the soft grey gritted slag heaps. The industrial rock dust de-saturates the colour from the clattering palms and speckled pea hens pick at the rubbish sacks.
It is late when we arrive at the Temple of Literature. The dragons on the rooftops arch elegantly into the sky. When they encircle the moon as it drops down behind the pagoda the land will be fertile, Mi, my motorbike driver tells me. The massive black wooden pillars are inscribed in red and gold along their length.
‘What do they say?
‘ I canno’ tell you. On the lef’ is a question, on the righ’ the answer. They are part of same structure. This i’ Vietnamese. Is difficult to explain.
Here too there are black H’moung tribes-people but we have not seen them. I wonder if this is why the dogs are black – that some strange form of animalistic transubstantiation takes place here amongst these scarred mountains; the beauty and the devastation of the landscape close packed. Mi’s long dark hair streaks into my face as we bike onwards along the bare new highway.
Back in Hanoi we link up with Phuong parking his motorbike by an East meets West café. Inside ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is playing; a song which appears in the Vietnamese National Curriculum Level 7 Unit 4. I am an expert. The waiter hovers, uncertain as to whether to lay a place for our Vietnamese associate. Phuong hands over the National Curriculum textbooks for us to work with in England.
‘The rest I scan and send as an attachment or DVD.
‘Thank you. How did the reburial of grandmother go?
‘It went well. She jus’ bones now. We finish by the time the sun rise but I say to the family – not to do thi’ again. It i’ too hard. I must go now Dei’re. We wi’ work together, again.
‘Yes
We shake hands and he gives a short formal speech.
‘When you be back here?
‘I cannot tell you
The last time I moved to kiss a Vietnamese person they backed awkwardly as if avoiding the sting of a bee. Sometimes it is difficult to say what you feel. We shake hands a second time.
By the time the sun rises we will be high above Hanoi where a million motorbikes gracefully enmesh like sea fish swimming and as we fly over the mountains they will seem like gravel.